This "Professional Idiot" Claimed He Smuggled Himself on a Plane in a Suitcase

You may be an idiot if you even try to stuff yourself into a suitcase and fly as cargo on an airplane — for so many reasons we wouldn't need to begin to list here. And at least YouTube vlogger Adam Saleh didn't try to debate that part, describing himself as a "professional idiot" as part of a video he posted that claimed to show his friends helping to stuff him in a suitcase and smuggle him on a Tigerair flight from Melbourne to Sydney in Australia. So we've clearly established the idiot part — but other portions of this wild story were up for debate.

Well, since the video was posted — and nearly 700,000 people have already viewed it as of this writing, BTW — a spokesperson from Tigerair posted an open letter to Saleh’s various social media channels claiming that the whole thing was fake, and that the airline's security footage proves it. "There are a few little inconsistencies in your production that don't line up with reality," the spokesperson wrote.

First of all, the clip shows Saleh's friends getting out of a taxi and wheeling him to a check-in area where they pay an overweight fee for the bag containing him, before it goes off along the conveyor belt. Tigerair pointed out the automated bag-drop machines only take a maximum of about 70 pounds — not more than twice that, for an adult man.

As well, the airline added that the baggage hold wouldn't have been heated — so the fact that he's pouring sweat in the video is totally inconsistent with what he would have actually been: completely frozen.

“Had you been in the baggage hold, by the time you arrived in Sydney, you would have been a popsicle,” said the airline spokesperson.

Well, the vlogger eventually added an update to the description of his video — confirming the whole thing was indeed a prank.

See the video for yourself, and file the whole thing — real or fake — under "what not to do."

Update: The plot thickened early this morning after Delta Air Lines responded to accusations Saleh made that he was kicked off a plane before it took off because he was speaking in Arabic to his mother — and he expressed his rage about that confrontation in a serious of tweets that also went viral.

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